The book works by story rather than by doctrine. Its arguments arrive as anecdotes, and the anecdotes are told well enough that they have circulated in Chinese for two thousand years independent of any philosophical use made of them.
The butterfly dream closes the second chapter: Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly, wakes, and cannot establish which of the two is dreaming the other. Cook Ding carves an ox for a duke and his blade has needed no sharpening in nineteen years, because he no longer looks but works along the natural seams and gaps. The debate on the bridge over the Hao, in the Outer Chapters, has Zhuangzi remark that the fish below are happy and his friend Huizi demand to know how he could possibly know, which turns into a dispute about whether anyone can know anything of another mind. The useless tree is too gnarled for timber and therefore lives out its full span, a point the book makes repeatedly about the survival value of being of no use to power.
Underneath these lies a consistent position. Distinctions such as useful and useless, large and small, life and death are made by the perspective that draws them, not found in things; the sage does not abolish perspectives but stops mistaking his own for the view from nowhere. The word often used for the result is you, wandering or free roaming, an ease that comes from having no fixed position to defend.
The stance towards death follows. Told that Zhuangzi was found drumming on a tub and singing after his wife died, a visitor is scandalised; the answer is that she has changed as the seasons change, and that wailing would show he had not understood.